Towards A Model for Understanding Cooperative-work in Developing Information systems

The understanding of the organizational constraints and working practices within projects is a requirement in developing information systems for use in an organization. Our purpose is to improve particularly the understanding of cooperative work in organizations. Two objectives are considered: (a) taking into account the three main dimensions of a cooperative work: Collaboration, Coordination and Communication (b) taking into account the integration of both technical and social aspects in software. According to those objectives, the model we propose characterizes a work organization in terms of network of dependencies among entities which we define in this paper. The basic idea consists in capturing the cooperation aspects by keeping track of entity dependencies, and by controlling entity change propagation through these dependencies.